My grandmother and my mother were visiting an art museum in Boston. This was years ago when my mother was a little girl. They were by themselves in a quiet gallery looking at a painting when my grandmother farted loudly. She hadn’t noticed the gentleman standing nearby. She turned to my mother and said, “Penelope!” and stalked away.
Although this is a funny story, it is also rather sad. My poor mother! My grandmother was heartless and cruel in that moment. The fact that my mother remembered this story and told it to me decades later meant that it still held power for her. It was a kind of emblem of her relationship with her mother who could be cruel at times. My mother could be cruel to me at times, too, and in turn, I could also be thoughtlessly cruel to others.
I doubt that my grandmother ever apologized to my mother for treating her so poorly in that instance. My mother has never apologized to me for the way she has treated me cruelly at times. That doesn’t mean that I need do the same.
We all inherit certain characteristics from our parents, certain traits of which we are not proud. Every time we enact that bad behavior is an opportunity to make amends and to act with mindfulness the next time.
Every time we enact that bad behavior is an opportunity to make amends.
As a writer I am often asked to critique others’ work. It is a valuable tool to get honest feedback from another writer. But when a writer asks, “Are you enjoying this story?” What if my answer is, “No.”
That’s my mother talking in her blunt way. I have had to teach myself to be mindful of my words and realize that I can respond kindly and gently without resorting to rudeness. “No,” may be honest, but isn’t it a bit cruel? Mightn’t I couch my words and say something like, “At the beginning I had a little trouble following the plot and understanding the relationships between the characters. I’m enjoying it much more towards the middle where I can see what’s going on and am intrigued. I want to find out what the outcome will be.”
In this case, I’m glad I paid attention to my initial reaction and paused so that I could respond thoughtfully. All of us can choose different behaviors from the poor ones we have been taught.
I imagine myself in an art gallery with my daughter and farting into the silence, then laughing and saying something like, “Oops! Excuse me. Sorry about that,” then wafting the air and slinking away, taking hold of my daughter’s hand. Maybe the person standing behind us grimaced, and shrugged, and said, “It happens.” Or said nothing at all and pretended nothing happened. What I mean to say is that when we put down our defenses, we make the world a kinder place to live in with all our imperfections, even the smelly ones.
No one is perfect. Neither am I, but I can strive to be mindful, thoughtful, intelligent, and kind.
